Outlawed

MOVIE DETAILS

Rating: 2.8 out of 10
Director: Adam Collins, Luke Radford
Writer: Adam Collins, Luke Radford
Star Cast: Adam Collins, Emmeline Hartley, Andy Calderwood
Genres: Action
Release Date: October 2, 2018

Outlawed

For seven years, more than three hundred crew members, one chopper, no funding, and two directors who didn’t even know how to direct a film. Other than the absence of a formal Structure in Nottingham, the filming of Outlawed is said to have been a herculean task; monumental, even. Some people thought it would never be made. Dramatic tales of gun fights, buildings blowing up, and infuriated Councillors were poised to become the stuff of storytelling greatness. Now that the film has been acquired for distribution, thanks to an American Netflix deal and a worldwide DVD launch, co directors Adam Collins and Luke Radford speak to us about this film that has captured the attention of an entire city in the right and wrong sense of the word…

“We were trying to crank out one last sequence to finish the film,” describes the co-director, co-writer and also one of the actors in the self-financed action film Outlawed James Adams Collins, “I didn’t know it at the time, but I knew it had to be a huge battle.” He later remembers looking at the Nottingham City Council as he told his partner Luke, “Why don’t we just blow that up? It would be entertaining, I was convinced.”

Nor was it indeed the end of the story of Outlawed, Collins intended to push this further and had directed this film even before its ending. Many years later Collins began firing from his career as a Royal Marine to try to act. “I was looking forward to competing in stunts and also auditioning simultaneously,” “But my agent was always pushing me towards roles that were impossible for me to achieve,” he recalls. Unlike most other frustrated actors, Collins was fortunate to have another day job, which in one way was much better than being unemployed: “I had been working in the role of an anti-piracy officer for ships in Somalia. Most of it was just staring at a quiet ocean for a long time it can be tedious.”

Once again, and for the third time, the British actor got irritated and used the opportunity frustration to build the narrative he wished to convey.

“After making my own film I felt that I could portray any character I dreamt of. So, on my own pavilion on the outside of the ship, with a G36 rifle assault weapon at my side I let my fingers fly over the keyboard.” Outlawed was born as an idea and a character and a story: Jake, a former Marine on a one man quest to retrieve his female love who has been kidnapped by this ruthless crime organization with strong links to the government.

At this time, Collins was still in the UK and Luke Radford, Collins’ co-director, joined them later on. I’ve made some music videos and a short film, but I never really had any desire in directing an action film, I have never watched that sort of cinema. But when the proposition of directing an over the top action film in the style of Die Hard or the Bourne films was presented to me, I would have been stupid to refuse.”

Even for highly passionate filmmakers, shooting a low budget short film over a free weekend can be gruelingly tough so how did the duo manage to get other people involved in such a big scale project? Over and again the answer is stubborn people. Collins says, “There was no money obviously we were going to shoot an epic action film anyway. Everyone was saying the same thing, that it was going to be a small weekend film like any other Nottingham short film.”

Turning point came when Collins used his military contacts to book a perfect site for filming, Little Barracks of Chilwell.

“I was only looking for a storage space to film a few shots, but I walked away with an authorization to film inside a large Afghanistan compound with a full-scale chinook helicopter.” One day prior to their planned filming of the locker scene, Collins called Radford and the two modified a part of the script that evening to incorporate the new location in the desert.

However, since the two had no budget other than their own personal funds no industry presence, and a script that was being rewritten even while shooting was still underway, shooting was infrequent, until the two got to the turning point in production. “It’s hard to forget,” Radford recalls, “we had approximately twenty minutes out of an unfinished film of which about most was a duster, Adam was soon going to be a Hollywood stuntman, I was somewhere halfway in doing PGCE, we were quite ruined. We had been working on the movie for two years and although we were close to completion still it just wasn’t working. I told them that we are either going to allocate proper time and resources for proper completion or let it go and stick a fork in it.”

Just like throughout the course of the entire production, it was the borderline-insane focus and tenacity of Collins that was the sole reason the film was still in production. “We had come this far. We had come this far. Giving up at that point was not really a viable option.” He reasons. “You see, I envisaged that the film had become infamous by now, and most people must have thought of me as a right wally. But that was the point, we were aiming for something amazing, and it was costing us a lot. What do you know, there is never a gain without a pain.”

But then in 2017, and even Collins did not remember how many days in total that Radford had spent making this production, they reached a point where both felt content and ready enough to end the filming process and move on to editing.

“The whole thing was a great learning experience but the edit was the biggest,” Radford says. “In the beginning, all I did was drag and drop and throw in footage on a timeline. But now I know Premier Pro like the back of my hand.”

Having finished the edit of the film, the pair set out to the newest frontier: seeking out distribution. “We went to Cannes with a trailer, having been contacted by a couple of companies that had noticed the film on IMDb,” Collins explains, “and one of them practically bit our hand off. They instantly said they wanted it.”

“It was literally two days after we had completed the trailer,” he goes on, “But then I had to learn contract law in about two weeks, because the two of us were first time filmmakers, we were in risk of getting robbed by the distributors.”

Having finalized the international distribution, and following a world premiere at Cineworld Nottingham (Collins arrived by repelling down the front of the Cornerhouse building), the two are positioned to contemplate whether the seven year odyssey was a waste.

“I think we just wanted to see how far we could go with the whole thing,” Radford says, “and it did push us higher.” For Radford, the ‘next level’ was the short film I’ll Be Here After The Factory is Gone that was commended early this year, and for Collins, stunts in Hollywood films like Aladdin, Dunkirk and Game of Thorns, and the Hood: A Legend Reborn, which is his directional follow-up to Outlawed and is currently in the making.

“There will always be a target audience for a movie like Outlawed,” Collins concludes, “its a 15-30 year old male target market who on a Saturday night gets a curry and beer and just craves a mindless violence action film.”

So this is an Asylum movie which we usually avoid, considering the abysmal level of writing and the horrific aesthetics. Well this does not change anything. The writing is extremely poor and the graphics are appalling. What is difficult to explain is how this one feels different from their other trash. There’s really not any “boxes of dialogue” in the middle. There’s no slouching and cuts between characters who do not talk about anything important for the most part. 200 MPH is more like randomly meandering between scenes which may or may not be relevant to the storyline but aren’t, because we never know what the primary storyline is in the first place.

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